The Card

Looking at the card the first thing we notice is the sweet looking color change on the IceQ cooler which has been traditionally clear / white. The black looks awesome, though, and especially against the HIS blue and copper heatpipes. It would've been awesome to see a black PCB to just complete the whole look.

The cooler does just look overall very mean and one of the best things about the HIS design is they stick to the same kind of fan design as AMD which sees the air get pushed out the back of the card. Throw in some massive heatpipes and we should have an awesome performing cooler.

Moving around the card we've got the typical two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors. Looking at the cooler and the placement of the connectors I thought it would be really annoying to install our PCI Express power connectors. Fortunately there's quite a large gap present making sure that the installation and removal of the connectors is easy.

Closer to the front we've got a single CrossFire connector and while the cooler is overall pretty large, it doesn't hinder the CrossFire connector at all.

Looking at the I/O side of things we've got a fairly standard setup with a single Dual-Link DVI connector, HDMI port and two MiniDP connectors. Across the top we've got the vents and because of the way the cooler is designed they're going to be useful in pushing the air straight out the back of the case.

Specifications

Being a Turbo model means that the HIS offering here comes overclocked out of the box and looking below you can see it's a decent overclock with the core going from an even 1000MHz to 1100MHz while the 2GB of GDDR5 stays at the default 4800MHz QDR.

Since the PowerColor PCS+ card we looked at came in at 1100MHz / 4900MHz QDR there didn't seem like much reason to retest the HIS card at what is almost the same clock speeds. So we decided to do some overclocking via MSI Afterburner and you can see we pushed the core to a massive 1275MHz and the 2GB of GDDR5 to 5600MHz QDR.

This is a huge overclock; from the default 1000MHz core clock, 275MHz on top of that equates to a percentage increase of 27.5%. That's just a massive increase in performance. Combined with the higher memory clock we should really see some strong performance out of the card here today.

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